As a longtime fan of her music, I was bummed at the news of Loretta Lynn's death earlier this week. Not because her death was especially tragic — far from it. Her life started hard, but she died rich and successful, at age 90. She lived long enough to see music critics finally value her and other female country artists like Dolly Parton the way they long did male figures like Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. She even got to record with Jack White, which seems like a great experience for any musician not named Meg White. May we all have a chance to go out like she did.
No, I was dreading The Discourse. I did not look forward to people calling her a "feminist," simply because she had a brash sound and tough-girl lyrics — or even because her songs are often about how much men suck. I did not look forward to aesthetic Stalinists shaming anyone for enjoying her music on the grounds that she was a Donald Trump supporter. I didn't want to hear the pseudo-intellectual assertion that you must "separate the art from the artist" in response, a claim rooted in half-remembered English lit classes. It makes even less sense when you look at someone like Lynn, who wove her personal life — with many warts on display — into her music, both as legitimate artistic expression and as a marketing ploy.
